It’s funny, because the blogs won, and most of the websites/apps/screenthings we use on a daily basis either *are* blogs or they look like blogs.

But we don’t write personal blogs these days, do we?

(Look, I know this is well-trod territory, but every time I look at this particular personal blog and see the last post was May 2013, I feel silly, so allow me this indulgence.)

The best personal blogs I read these days are email newsletters. And they’re not necessarily published every day, and they’re not necessarily personal. And they’re not blogs, either.

But we blog all day, on Twitter and Facebook (Remember microblogging? Remember linkblogs?) and for a certain demographic, maybe Tumblr or Instagram or S N A P C H A T wait the whole messaging thing turns the idea of “blogs” inside-out and backwards, but still. But. Still.

I kinda miss blogging?

Also, this is the first time I’ve opened up the WordPress “Write” screen (not what it’s called anymore) in ages, and even with almost no fancy plugins left turned on here, it feels a little Enterprisey for me. Too many buttons, too many decisions, all the custom fields and categories and tags and format options and checkboxes — and really, this is pretty stripped down compared to fully outfitted WordPress-as-Content-Management-System systems.

I want a system that intuitively sees me pasting in a big block of text with quotes around it and says “Yo, that’s clearly a blockquote, I’ve got this,” before I can find the right button on a toolbar. I want a system that knows the only thing I’ve dropped into the body is a YouTube link and says “Dude, looks like a video post, no problem.”

You get the idea.

Tagging, of course, should be mostly automated, cleverness economy investments excluded, naturally, while we’re at it, suggest some links when I highlight some text and hmm I bet these are all plugins that someone has built and I’m going to hear from WordPress developer friends that everything I’m describing can be bolted onto my install in no time and…

“I have two exemplary pieces of 21st-century writing that I want to share with you. Neither is hot off the CMSes; they’ve both aged just a little in their tabbed casks. They have something deeply in common—though it might not be obvious at first.”

From my point of view, “writing great blog posts” feels like a thing of the past, except for a faithful few inspiring souls who still strive to build connections and point to common threads on the Web, not just curating the work of others, but adding something much more valuable than a pithy comment in the process.

It’s certainly a stock/flow issue these days, but I think so much of what I see passed around these days qualifies as flow: Short snippets, curated clips, a video, an animated gif, the trafficking of cleverness in the form of tweets or stars or likes or plusses or some other sharing system that helps us superglue badges to our vests like so many Indian Guides.

Finding time for stock is tricky. Often I feel like the writing I do here that gets the most attention (as measured by aforementioned counts and scores and RTs and stars and comments, etc.) is quick, throwaway, blast writing (not entirely unlike what you’re reading at the moment, eh?), spun up without a great deal of deep research or forethought.

But I do so admire the Dashes and Sloans and Carmodys et al, who do find the time, and provide us with more than fodder for the sharing circuit.

Spotted isolated bits of chatter over the weekend about this piece from Nate Silver, who used the available public data from Quantcast and elsewhere to make some assessments of the Huffington Post’s business model when it comes to unpaid contributors and their blogs.

Here’s Nate’s thesis:

“Although The Huffington Post does not pay those who volunteer to write blogs for it, this content represents only a small share of its traffic. And, to put it bluntly, many of those blog posts aren’t worth very much.” #

The rest of the analysis proves out that idea, which I’m not terribly interested in. It’s a fun game to play, evaluating traffic and revenue based on bits of public information, but I think there’s a less tangible benefit to hosting what essentially amount to “reader” blogs — even if the “readers” happen to be famous people or politicians.

The benefit in question? These readers are far less likely (I’m making a big assumption here, no research backing this up yet) to blog somewhere else.

So instead of diluting that long tail of niche content (this may be a nice way to put it, in some cases) across hundreds or thousands of free Tumblrs and WordPress.com blogs and Blogspots, the Huffington Post and others like it have provided a technology platform to would-be bloggers. Perhaps even to celebrity dilettantes. In return for hosting these blogs — which at scale cannot be an expensive technical tally — HuffPo gets to add another mug to its stable, another self-promoting-but-not-enough-to-get-their-own blogger to stretch that long tail out.

A few interesting metrics I’d love to see on these “reader” blogs:

Bounce rate: Do readers hit these posts and leave, or do they get sucked in by the gaping maw of the HuffPo photo galleries and top 10 lists in the right rail?

Search traffic: Do readers find these posts in search engines, or are they coming to HuffPo specifically for these authors?

Sell-through rate on these lesser blogs. Is HufPo monetizing the network in any interesting way?

Am I conflating HuffPo’s paid bloggers with unpaid? I genuinely don’t really know who gets paid and who doesn’t, but either way, I think my logic holds up:

The benefits of owning the platform for all these blogs, keeping the traffic moving under the HuffPo brand, keeping readers on their remarkably sticky pages, is as valuable (more?) as the revenue on the pages themselves.

Christopher Conklin provides a relatively clear introduction to the math involved in CPM-based online advertising sales, in the context of trying to settle an argument between Henry Blodget and Felix Salmon.

When I started this blog, in my first week as a Mass Communications graduate student at San Jose State, it was hosted at Blogspot, and it was anonymous. That lasted for about a month.

Pretty quickly, I signed up for a free WordPress instance at Blogsome, where I enjoyed a bit more freedom to learn html and css by fiddling with the files in the WP admin. It was ryansholin.blogsome.com, and I’m pretty sure that was the point where I started calling it “Ryan Sholin’s J-School Blog.”

Straightforward enough, right?

Of the early posts I’ve preserved, the earliest in my archives, dated February 1, 2005, was about Steve Sloan’s visit to an undergrad-level journalism class I was taking, which I believe was called something along the lines of Internet Information Gathering. Steve talked about podcasting, and smiled when I mentioned I was subscribed to a few RSS feeds as Firefox live bookmarks. Wonkette was probably on my list, and PressThink, maybe Scripting News, and possibly Romenesko.

By the end of the semester I was taking notes at online journalism panels and blogging them as fast as I could, and Chuck Olsen said that blogs were people (Soylent Green, style, though) and I got it.

That summer, my Web-savvy mom gave me ryansholin.com as a present, and I switched over to a hosted WordPress installation of my own, beginning a cycle of design, redesign, and play.

But mostly, there was a lot of blogging. A lot of ideas. A few kneejerk reactions. Some commentary on technology. Some hopes for the future.

When I was in journalism school, I blogged a lot about what I thought journalism schools should do.

When I worked for a newspaper, I blogged a lot about what I thought newspapers should do.

When I worked for a media company, dealing with hundreds of newspapers, I realized every single one of them was different, and trying to tell any of them what they should do was a Sisyphean task of very heavy-duty proportions, and moreso, a bit silly.

I learned to take everything I had picked up about the business of news and apply it in each given situation, instead of writing manifestos about What Newspapers Should Do.

But to rewind a bit, in the middle of 2007 when I worked at a newspaper, I wrote a blog post, slowly, over the course of a few weeks, and posted it at just the right moment on just the right day, and thousands of people read it.

Pointing out the obvious to an audience that might not have spotted it yet and then repeating myself over and over again has become, shall we say, my thing.

Occasionally this thought makes me flash back to a conversation with a political science professor who explained why he used so much repetition in his lectures. He said he kept bringing the important concepts up again and again, iterating his presentation of them, using different examples, drawing different diagrams, all in an effort to make sure everyone in the room who was going to understand it, understood it. He gauged reactions with eye contact and good questions, and if he saw too many blank stares, he’d push through the idea in yet another way, or come back to it next week, approaching it from a different angle.

For those of you keeping score, this blog has been instrumental in getting every full-time job I’ve had in the news business. You don’t get to act like someone who has ideas unless there’s some evidence of your ideas out there in the wild.

So as this blog turns five years old and starts asking for bigger and better toys when we go to the store, I must admit I have a few urges.

One is to take my old “Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education” tagline and chop off the prepositional section so it’s just me talking about the future. Of anything. And everything. I’ll do it soon, but you know I’ll keep talking about news and newspapers and publishing and reporting.

The second is to redesign again. It’s been awhile, believe it or not. I’ll get around to it.